Men’s Olympic Hockey Preview

The men’s portion of Olympic Hockey gets underway Wednesday (very early) morning here in North America. There’s no NHL players at this year’s games, but that doesn’t mean it won’t be a fun tournament that still has quite a few very good players, and a number of guys casual hockey fans might recognize.

But who is set to win the Gold in this strange Olympic year? We try and figure that out, as well as giving you a list of players for each team that you might remember or recognize.

Group A

Canada

Maxim Lapierre – You’ll probably recognize this guy because he’s a gigantic piece of shit who had a penchant for taking post-whistle scrums a bit too far while being unable to hit the broad side of a barn with the puck. It’s gonna suck ass watching this shithead play again and I’m not looking forward to it.

Rene Bourque – In his heyday, he put up 58 and 50 point seasons back to back. Unfortunately, those were 2010-12.

Projection

Gold: Russia

Silver: Sweden

Bronze: Who cares

Look, we can wax poetic about grit, grind, and hard work all we want but when I look at this, all I see is Pavel Datsyuk, Ilya Kovalchuk, Slava Voynov, and Alexy Marchenko shooting on Ben Scrivens and Dave Leggio. Nothing good can come of that and even if the US and Canada were allowed to bring in ringer goalies to beef up these rosters, I still say Russia takes it in a walk.

If any team manages to take Russia to overtime, it should be considered an achievement.